You Know What Else is Dangerous? BundleStars – Part Thirty-Five: Neon Bundle

Dark Fear - You wake up in a cabin in the woods and your memory is gone. You'll have to fight monsters and undo curses to figure out what's going on. A first-person puzzle adventure game done in a classic 8-bit style (which mitigates the impact of the game's few jumpscares), with rpg elements like turn-based battles (spiked, not random) and upgradable weapons and armor. Because the battles are set and the damage numbers are predetermined, there's no randomness: You can either win a battle because you have the proper equipment, or you can't. Which makes it more of a puzzle than any kind of real strategy. The game takes less than four hours, and much of that is padding from having to do the hunting minigame over and over to upgrade your armor. I enjoyed it; it was amusing and didn't outstay its welcome.

Fox & Flock - Peg-jumping puzzles with assorted rules and a vague story about Victorian foxes. I dislike that style of puzzle in general and I found the art style here very hard to differentiate.

Slap The Fly - Humans vs. pests (flies, bees, mice) in a 3D arena, effectively playing tag. The primary draw is the online game, which no one is playing and wouldn’t be my thing regardless. Meh.

RFLEX - A very simple game: You have a 3x3 grid and need to jump among the spots to avoid blocks that come flying at you. Survive for 60 seconds to beat the level. What then follows is essentially a reflex test, which gets boring fast.

Townsmen - A medieval township simulation game, clearly designed for mobile gaming, which the standard “wait for buildings to recharge then collect from them” sort of setup, and a dozen different buildings to manage happiness, needs and emergencies along with multiple production trees for trade goods. I don’t usually object to the setup, but there are just too many meters, factors and complications given the scale of the game. It looks like it should be a relatively simple clicker, but the level of complication sets SimCity to shame.

TREBUCHET - A strategic board game that involves blocks and balls, and you need to try to line up your balls by moving blocks and tilting the table, so that multiple balls strike enemy pieces and remove them. It’s an interesting and original take on a board game, and I didn’t particularly like playing it.

In Celebration of Violence - An action roguelike in which you need to kill lots of things, up to and including the local gods. When you die, some of your experience is recovered and can be used to permanently upgrade your characters. This is technically an Early Access game, but there’s clearly plenty of material if you want to go searching for it. (This is the sort of game that demands, and has, its own wiki.) I didn’t find the gameplay exciting enough to play a lot of.

Survivor Squad: Gauntlets - A top-down shooter with puzzle elements, in that your characters fire automatically and most of what you’re doing is trying to maneuver and direct them with unpleasant mouse-based controls. If you really like it, the game comes with an editor so you can make and dissect levels to your heart’s content. I found the controls unpleasant and if the game has a plot, I wasn’t willing to stick around for it.

Razenroth - A top-down shooter with a vague horror/fantasy setting, and some sorta-rpg, sorta-roguelike systems. Or basically, you explore the mysterious forest finding randomly-generated items and limited-inventory potions, and shooting monsters with magic blasts that improve as you gain levels. It’s—okay? Kinda repetitive run-and-gun gameplay?

The Tale of Doris and the Dragon - Episode 1 - A very short, heavily pixelated puzzle adventure game in which you need maneuver an old lady named Doris (who gets help from a long-suffering dragon named Norb) through some sort of purgatory. Honestly, it feels more like a tech demo than a game, as you can blitz through “episode 1” in half an hour (assuming you are good at obtuse puzzle game moon logic), and episode 2 is apparently still in development.

Binaries - One of the “move both of these things at once” puzzle game, specifically platformer style. You’ve got two balls, orange and blue, and you need to get them both past various spikes and lasers to both of their exits. Moderately fun with a decent tutorial scheme, though after a while it overwhelms my skill level. Credit to the developer for having a good sense of humor.

Road to Ballhalla - A rolling-ball action/puzzle game, where a major gimmick is that you can take a few hits, unless you’re dashing, in which case, one touch kills you. So there’s a strong risk/reward system and your ability to twitch-dash becomes increasingly important. I thought the first few levels were fun, but my less-than-awesome reflexes made later areas frustrating.

Overall: This was a mix of all sorts of games, many of them puzzle-ish. I enjoyed Dark Fear and feel like Binaries and Road to Ballhalla would be more fun if I had the reflexes to be better at them. And as usual, I was very entertained for my $2.

You Know What Else is Dangerous? BundleStars – Part Thirty-Six: Hotshot Bundle

Zombo Buster Rising - A defensive shooter with elements of both rpgs and tower defense games: Waves of zombies attack your fort, and you need to shoot them down before they reach you. You gain two npc shooters (and can level up all three characters) and an assortment of special abilities. The stars you get for clearing stages without getting hit also earn you upgrades. I found this to be a lot of fun, and it only took a few hours to clear everything. If I had one complaint, it's that the coolest zombies are kinda back-loaded, and the new critters introduced in the last few stages could have been spaced out better.

Chicken Assassin - Master of Humiliation - A casual clicker / “numbers go up” fighting game, which I don’t think I’ve seen before. You play as a savage boxing chicken who is trying to chase down the thugs who kidnapped the girl he’s in love with by beating up waves upon waves of them. You gain XP and levels, and also collect souls and equipment for defeating enemies, so there’s a lot of failing, upgrading, and trying again.

Hack RUN - A hacking simulation puzzle game based around a monochrome terminal. Amusingly meta, it periodically directs you to websites to discover passwords or secret messages. Cute idea. Relatively short (less than an hour) but also fairly repetitive once you’ve seen the gimmicks.

ASCII Attack - A cute little two-stick shooter done entirely in ASCII art on a pinfeed printer paper background. As a game it’s only okay (though the controls are a little odd, they’re surprisingly intuitive), but I love the nostalgic quality of the graphical style.

Super Hop 'N' Bop ULTRA - Gameboy graphics two-player-only arena fighter where the only think you can do is jump. "Not much to it" in the sense that my Atari Flashback has more complicated and engaging games on it.

Meld - Puzzle game in which you stack colored tiles and meld them to create a monochrome road between energy points. Interesting concept that they layer a lot of complications onto, that gets hard fast if you don't intuitively “get” how to approach the puzzles.

Green Game: TimeSwapper - Not quite a puzzle-platformer, but along the same lines as an action/puzzle game. You need to manipulate time so that certain obstacles direct a bird to collect medals and reach the stage exit without ramming walls or spikes. (The game encourages mouse controls, which I found insufficiently responsive. Keyboard arrows were fine.) It's fine, but doesn't excite me all that much. And the time travel aspect is kinda wasted.

Home is Where One Starts... - A very short first-person exploration game, in which a women returns to her alcoholic father's home in the American south and explores the surroundings. There's all of one puzzle and a dozen voice-overs to find; getting all of the achievements takes less than an hour. It's atmospheric and I get what they were going for, but I think a game like Gone Home does it better.

The Battle for Sector 219 - This is a strategic card game that I found very convoluted, as there are many rules that aren’t terribly clear and far too many complications of what can beat what and where you can play things. Suffice it to say, I didn’t like it.

The Seven Years War (1756-1763) - A 4X-style strategy/simulation game that does its best to model the Seven Years’ War and all of the resources, trading, manpower and the like that went into it. I’m sure it would be fun if you were into that sort of thing.

This bundle also had Axis Football 2016 and Global Soccer Manager, which I'm pretty sure aren't my thing at all, so I didn’t bother trying them.

Overall: Zombo Buster and Chicken Assassin, neither of which I would have predicted, ended up being my favorites from this bundle. And I wouldn’t call anything in this bundle a particularly shining gem, but there was still entertainment to be had.